


Glass

by machine_dove



Series: Mirror [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Abuse of Norse mythology, Angst, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Bucky Barnes is a life-ruining murderkitten, Fairy Tale Elements, Hurt Bucky Barnes, It Gets Better, M/M, So much angst, Temporary Character Death, mostly - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-05
Updated: 2015-08-05
Packaged: 2018-04-13 03:27:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4505955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/machine_dove/pseuds/machine_dove
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s unbelievable is what it is, this tiny bit of nothing, facing down three kids twice his size with absolutely nothing to back it up but spitfire and vinegar, and James doesn’t realize it then but this is the moment he’s lost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Glass

It starts one muggy day in 1925.  His ma is working on a basket of mending when she shoos him from the house, telling him to stop being so underfoot.  He’s wandering the streets of Brooklyn bored out of his mind when he hears the sound of a fight, and he’s a curious enough kid that he can’t resist investigating.

 

What he sees is nothing he could have imagined.  Billy McConnell and his pals are pummeling some kid half their size, which isn’t anything new, but what is new is the look on this kid’s face, all fire and stubborn determination through the blood and bruises.  One more punch and the kid’s down, and he thinks that’s it - Billy’s done his thing, shown off who’s boss, it’s enough.  But the kid doesn’t stay down, doesn’t look like it was ever even an option.  No, he fights his way to his feet, eyes flashing, shaking like it’s all he can do to stand and looking like he’s prepared to stand there until judgement day.

 

“Is that all you’ve got?”

 

It’s unbelievable is what it is, this tiny bit of nothing, facing down three kids twice his size with absolutely nothing to back it up but spitfire and vinegar, and James doesn’t realize it then but this is the moment he’s lost.  And then suddenly he’s right in the thick of it, scrapping like it’s his job and standing between this live wire and anything in the world that might hurt him like it’s what he was put on this world to do.  

 

Billy and his boys run off, but the kid doesn’t relax and doesn’t back down, just glares James down like he could set him on fire with his eyes.  When James just blinks back, not entirely sure what just happened or what’s supposed to happen next, it’s like a signal to this kid that it’s over.  He scrubs at his face, not doing much but smearing the blood from his nose everywhere.

 

“I had ‘em on the ropes.”

 

“I know ya did.  Why didn’t you just stay down?”

 

His face grows mulish.  “I don’t like bullies,” like that makes any sense, like that’s the only possible answer.  And maybe for him it is.

 

“The name’s James Buchanan Barnes,” he says as he sticks out his hand.

 

“‘M Steve.  You don’t look much like a James, can I call you Bucky?”

 

Ja-  Bucky smiles.

 

 

* * *

 

It’s just after Thanksgiving 1941, and Bucky’s not finding much to be thankful for this year.  Work had picked up thanks to the war over in Europe and he’s been able to buy them better food, even meat sometimes, but Steve’s earlier bout with pneumonia left him weak and he’s just not recovering the way he should.  And then Mrs. O’Grady’s new baby comes down with whooping cough and Steve catches it even though he wasn’t anywhere near the squirt and then it’s day after day of endless, wracking coughs that leave him shaking and gasping for air, vomiting up what little he’s been able to eat, over and over again.  Their neighbors are a godsend, washing their soiled linens and leaving gifts of soup that Bucky begs and pleads Steve to eat, hoping for something, anything that might stay down, might give him strength, might soothe the endless choking cough.  Bucky holds him close, rubbing his chest to try to soothe it, trying with sheer force of will to give Steve some of his vitality along with his body heat, rubbing his hands and feet when they get white and cold like it’s too much trouble for Steve’s heart to pump blood all that way when it’s struggling already to keep up with Steve’s indomitable spirit.

 

And Steve just keeps coughing, can’t even lay down it gets so bad, just huddles upright in the corner supported by both of their pillows and wrapped in every blanket they own and a few from their neighbors, coughing bad enough that two of his ribs crack and coughing still through the sharp, white-hot pain.  He sleeps when he can, short and fitful rests that barely help between violent outbursts, lungs laboring and fighting for whatever little breath they can get.  Steve’s always been a fighter, always, and he’s never let anything keep him down, not  anything .  

 

But bullies aren’t the only enemy in the world and sheer willpower isn’t always enough.  One night in early December Steve drops his head back on Bucky’s shoulder, neck loose like he just can’t bear to hold it up a second longer.  Bucky’s arms are around him, warm and loose, and he lets out a long sigh.

 

“I wish things were different, Buck.”

 

“Yea, me too pal.  I wish a lot of things were different.”

 

Steve’s voice drops lower, almost a whisper.  “Wish I was stronger, wish I wasn’t such a damn coward.”

 

“Hey, that’s my best friend you’re talking about there, I’m not going to sit here and listen to that crap.  You’re the strongest person I know.”

 

His breathing is hesitant, labored, and Bucky finds himself breathing harder like he can somehow make his lungs work for both of them.

 

“Not strong enough.  Never told you...never told you I loved you.  That you were everything.  Never kissed…”  He exhaled, a long and broken thing.  

 

Bucky held his breath, waiting for that next inhale, reeling.  He held, and held, and held, until he had to breathe in, unwilling and unable to accept that Steve hadn’t done the same.

 

He was eight years old when he first learned that you could live with your heart walking around outside your body.  He was twenty five when his heart cracked, broke, shattered into dust.  He was twenty five when his heart died.

 

* * *

 

It’s December of 1941, and the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor.  The USA is at war, finally, and Barnes enlists.  His heart is dead but his body is still alive, and it’s what St...it’s the only thing he can think of to do.  They give him a uniform and a gun, and there’s a beautiful simplicity in following orders, in the crack of a rifle, in the distant satisfaction of hitting his target.  

 

They give him a new name, Sergeant Barnes, and send him to the front where the mud and blood and gunpowder are a satisfying sort of awful that fits with the warzone where his heart used to be.  There are orders, there are targets, and at no point is he expected to think or feel.  His heart is dead and if he’s very lucky his body may soon follow.

 

* * *

It’s spring of 1943, and back in Brooklyn a German scientist is killed.  His secrets die with him, his vision unfulfilled.  Barnes doesn’t know, of course.  He has no reason to know.

 

* * *

 

The year is 1943 and the leaves are starting to change and Sergeant Barnes is finding it harder and harder to avoid thinking about the thing that he avoids thinking about.  He’s distracted, and his unit walks right into a trap that he should have spotted.  He’s shouting orders as his men run, bullets raining down around them, slogging through the mud and the chaos, trying to pull his unit to safety through sheer force of will, but willpower was never Barnes’ gift.  Some of them escape, but not enough, and Barnes can’t help but think that things would be different if he was a different person, if he hadn’t been careless and lost his heart.

 

They’re taken to a factory where their days are split between pointless back-breaking toil and tedious waiting in cells that are little more than cold concrete and iron bars.  Sometimes a group in uniforms and lab coats comes by to watch them.  Sometimes they select someone to go with them.  The people selected never come back.

 

Barnes works, moving a pile of rocks from here to there, and again back from there to here.  Designed to exhaust them, his mind whispers.  Designed to wear them down.  He moves rocks or waits, and it seems like one is much like the other until one day his turn comes and the men in lab coats pull him from the cage.

 

Things are different after that, as he’s strapped to a chair.  There are needles, and blood, and fire.  There’s so much fire burning him from the inside out, endlessly, that he doesn’t notice when or why the fire changes, and is burning from the outside in instead.  The chair burns, the straps burn, and Barnes burns but he’s free from the restraints and he’s burning but he’s  moving , one step and then another, until the burning is behind him and there’s nothing but clean, cold air moving through traitorous lungs that still breathe even though his heart is dead.

 

Barnes marches out of that factory, but he’s the only one.  He staggers, one step and then another, for an eternity until there are hands and voices and uniforms with familiar insignia, and so many questions that he doesn’t have answers for.  He should be dead, his heart is dead, but his body still lives and is put back into service for his country.  There’s a cold comfort in orders, and the crack of his rifle, and the satisfaction of hitting his targets.

 

 

* * *

 

It’s 1945, and Germany surrenders.  The war is over, except for the parts that aren’t.  Barnes likes orders, likes how it keeps him from thinking about the dead place in his chest, and has no qualms about joining up with the new organization that has risen up from the Strategic Scientific Reserve.  They like Barnes as well, especially as the years pass and he doesn’t age.  Sometimes there are needles and blood and questions he can’t answer, and people in lab coats with dissatisfied expressions.  More often there is mud and blood and the sharp crack of his rifle as he hits his target.

 

* * *

 

The year is 1974, and somewhere in the USSR a project is quietly terminated.  Six little girls who only know how to be weapons are never given the chance to learn more.

 

* * *

 

It’s 1991, and Obadiah Stane is sitting in a seedy bar with Barnes.  He slides an envelope across the table, and Barnes nods before walking out into the night.

 

Stane is found dead the next day, and the coroner declares it a mugging gone wrong.  Barnes gives the envelope to his handler with a small, satisfied smile.  

 

In the end it makes no difference, when just weeks later Howard Stark drove his car off the edge of a cliff on his way home from a charity gala with his wife.  His blood alcohol level was far, far too high, and neither he nor his wife survive the wreck.

 

* * *

 

The year is 1995, and Barnes watches his target through his scope.  The kid is young, younger than his years, and if he still had a heart the story the spare dossier tells would be enough to break it.  But Barnes doesn’t have a heart, it died in 1941, and his job is to take out Duquesne’s sharpshooters.  Both of them, and he doesn’t have a heart to care about this carnie punk who’s gotten in too deep.

 

“Talk to me, Barnes.  Do you have the shot?”  The calm, steady voice of his handler settles his nerves, reminds him that his job isn’t thinking, that better people than him have made this call.

 

His current handler is a better man than most, with a huge heart and a sharp mind hiding behind a carefully cultivated bland exterior.  Barnes trusts him, as much as he trusts anybody these days. 

 

“I have it,” he confirms.

 

“Take it,” Agent Coulson tells him, and he does.

 

* * *

 

It’s 2004, and a young scientist works, writes, rages in silence.  Inside him an angry child roars at all the things he wasn’t old enough, wasn’t big enough, wasn’t strong enough to stop.  His work doesn’t satisfy him, his relationship doesn’t satisfy him, nothing satisfies him.  The military doesn’t recruit him - they have no reason to.  And as the years pass he slowly, inexorably turns into his father - brilliant, bitter, full of rage.

 

* * *

 

It’s 2008, and Tony Stark is in Afghanistan demonstrating the terrifyingly effective Jericho missiles.  He returns home to Malibu, and the face of war changes forever.

 

* * *

 

The year is 2012, and Barnes is in New Mexico when a portal opens and a god walks through.  The scepter touches his chest, and everything is blue, blue, blue.   Where is your heart , a voice asks, and like that the spell breaks, because the blue is the wrong blue and his heart is dead and the scepter is in his hand and he shoves it through the god’s chest and there is blood, blood, blood.

 

And then there is lightning and fury and a roar of rage and grief that he feels to the bottom of his soul and he thinks “ Finally .”  The end has come, in a thunderous crash, and his body can finally join his heart in death.

 

But death doesn’t come, and he opens his eyes to a scene wholly different.  The mad god is crumpled, held in the arms of a man (god?) who calls him brother and sobs out his grief.  Is he dead?  Is he alive?  With gods, who can say?  Three women stand before him, the still-bloody scepter held by the one to his right, while the one to his left holds the glowing cube.  They seem so small as he looks down at them, they tower over him as he looks up.

 

“We owe you a debt,” they say in one voice.  A whisper, a crash, a symphony.  “The balance has been set right, we must restore the balance.  You are owed a boon.”

 

Barnes looks at them, silent.

 

“What do you want,” they ask in a chorus of dissonant harmony.

 

“I don’t want anything,” he answers simply.  “My heart is dead.”

 

And time unwinds, unravels, shatters.

 

 

* * *

 

It’s Thanksgiving of 1941, and Bucky has a lot to be thankful for.  He’s got extra money in his pocket, Steve’s recovering nicely from his bout of pneumonia, and the world is his oyster.  Sure, the talk is that the war’s coming, but who can be bothered to worry about that when he’s got two 60c specials from the diner on the corner complete with slices of roast pork and a couple of marshmallows from the factory for dessert.  Compared to the boiled cabbage they end up with more often than not it’s a feast fit for kings.

 

 

* * *

 

The year is 1944 and Steve finally has a body to match his spirit, but not even that’s enough to keep Bucky from throwing himself between the dumb punk and whatever dangers he may face.  And then he’s falling, falling, but his body doesn’t die.  How can it, when his heart still beats?

**Author's Note:**

> I'm so sorry. I haven't written anything in probably fifteen years, and then this crawled out of my head at probably 2AM. You can find me on [tumblr](http://machine-dove.tumblr.com/), where there is typicaly 10000% less angsting.


End file.
